Archive

I’m catching up on my backlog of interesting bookmarks. Among them are a couple of endpoint.tv video sessions with Leon Welicki and Ron Jacobs. Leon is reviewing a set of best practices for WF4 including when to use each base activity class, and so on. Good stuff. Definitely worth a viewing:

I’ve had a few emails from readers asking when my ProWF 4 book will be available. It was supposed to be available on June 30 (today) but for some reason it’s not. I’m not sure exactly why it’s held up — I know it’s been printed since I have my author copies in front of me right now. My best guess is that it should be available any day now from Amazon and perhaps a bit longer for other outlets.

No, I’m not attending the Microsoft love fest known as PDC (although I would have loved to go, I just couldn’t arrange it). So instead, I get to stay at home and read all about the cool new products and frameworks that Microsoft is announcing (and download the CTPs too).

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last year or so, you’ve heard something about “Oslo”. Although like me, you’ve probably not been able to fully understand just where MS was going with all of this. Well they’re finally starting to present more of their vision for the future of development.

Here’s a link to a good overview that MS has just published (written by David Chappell). It provides a high-level overview of how some of these future pieces will fit together. The pieces in this case are WF 4.0, Dublin (Windows Server extensions) and Oslo (Modeling repository).

The author copies of my new Pro WF for .NET 3.5 book arrived today. They look great! So if you’ve pre-ordered the book from your favorite on-line book seller, they should be shipping any day now. The official release date is next Monday the 23rd.

So my last post to this blog was back in November. I’ve been very busy working on an updated version of my Pro WF book. The new edition of my book was originally scheduled for availability in late July, but that date has now been moved up to June 23rd.

The new edition provides coverage of the new WF features in .NET 3.5 and includes two new chapters. One of the new chapters covers WF and WCF integration (workflow services). The other new chapter provides better coverage of building custom composite activities and handling long-running tasks. I’ve also reviewed and updated all of the example code, the text and the screen shots.

After a long wait, Visual Studio 2008 (formerly known as Orcas) is now available. I’ve been using beta 2 for some time now and it’s been very stable. .NET 3.5 is also included with VS 2008. I’ll now have to find a spare day to uninstall the beta and install RTM.

Microsoft announced today that it will be releasing the source code for the .NET Framework in the VS 2008 time frame later this year. No, it’s not going open source — instead it will be covered by something called the Microsoft Reference License. The intent is to allow us lowly developers a peek into the inner workings of the framework for debugging purposes.

VS 2008 will also provide an integrated debugging environment where missing bits of source code are downloaded automatically.